Catchment First

Nature based solutions are now being used alongside traditional engineering solutions to deliver more resilient services and wider benefits for people and nature.

As part of Catchment First, we’re making investments in a series of landscape scale habitat projects. Delivered in partnership with environmental charities, these include large floodplain restoration and wet woodland projects, pond creation, hedgerow planting and community education projects.

To illustrate just one of our Environmental Improvement projects, we’re currently delivering an innovative co-designed management plan in partnership with the South East Rivers Trust. The project involves the creation of 51 leaky woody dams, 14 ponds, 300 metres of river channel improvements and 16 hectares of wet woodland enhancement. We’re making this investment to hold more water in the landscape above our drinking water abstraction, helping our services remain resilient during periods of dry weather and low flow.

One of our long-term challenges is ensuring we have enough water to supply our customers and maintain a healthy environment. Collaborating with conservation bodies and regulators, with often complex investigation, our team of groundwater specialists has a detailed understanding of the links between our drinking water and the habitats and ecosystems in our landscape.

Where it is identified that we may be having an impact on the environment, on a precautionary basis we can reduce amount of water we abstract, making more available to support river flows or maintain wet areas valuable for nature conservation. However, increasing the amount of water does not fully address the problem. For example, chalk streams and wetland habitats are subject to other pressures such as historical modification for milling, fishing, urban development and land management. As such, we also carry out river and wetland environmental enhancement work alongside reductions in abstraction, to improve the ecological diversity and resilience of watercourses and wetlands to realise the greatest possible overall benefits.

One of our long-term challenges is ensuring we have enough water to supply our customers and maintain a healthy environment. Collaborating with conservation bodies and regulators, with often complex investigation, our team of groundwater specialists has a detailed

To ensure our abstractions are environmentally sustainable, we have a series of river and wetland enhancement schemes designed to improve ecological diversity and resilience to low flows. This work secures the protection and ecological enhancement of sections of precious chalk stream habitat in parts of Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

Soils are one of the most important building blocks to life on earth. They’re an important natural asset helping to keep water clean, give nature a home and produce food. Because soil is so important, Catchment First collaborates with the farmers and land managers who work in the environment where our drinking water comes from.

We’re delivering a wide range of projects focusing on building soil stability to reduce soil erosion. This also helps to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reduces the amount of fertilisers applied to land.

As an example, we’ve just completed a collaborative project with ten farms within the Arun to Adur Farmer cluster. This involved detailed soil monitoring of 30 fields with over 2,000 soil samples analysed over five-years. The project has been a valuable exercise in partnership working, creating an extensive understanding of soils, the importance of certain management techniques and the relationship between earthworms and healthy crops.

Two-thirds of our groundwater sources show high or increasing levels of nitrate. This needs to be reduced to meet drinking water standards. Whilst in some cases we have installed treatment facilities, these are costly to build and operate.

Catchment First takes a different approach, by working in partnership with farmers to improve nitrogen use efficiency and reduce the amount of fertiliser in drinking water sources.

Over the last five years we’ve worked with close to 100 farmers in our groundwater catchments investing in over 12,000 hectares of sustainable agriculture measures – that’s an area of nearly 20,000 football pitches where we’re working with farms to reduce fertiliser losses.

We also work closely with partner organisations and deliver local research and demonstration activity to raise awareness of the key issues.